On Sep 29, 1:54*pm, Ubiquitous > wrote:
> By Benji Wilson
>
> For someone whose gorgeous, pouting face once graced a book called How to Be a
> Domestic Goddess, Nigella Lawson has a lot of very mortal hang-ups. She is
> clumsy and she can be bad-tempered, she says. She doesn’t like her bum (“I
> tell my cameraman Neville that he’s not allowed to film my bottom”) or her
> hair (“In real life I don’t even have a hairdryer… as you can see”).
>
> TV conceals all of these things and she even feels bad about that. “When you
> do TV you’ve got a hair and make-up artist and nothing’s out of place.. So I do
> slightly worry that I disappoint in real life.”
>
> The point about the whole “Domestic Goddess” thing, of course, is that it was
> tongue-in-cheek. No one is a domestic goddess, not Nigella, not any of us, and
> if there is a line that runs through both her books and TV series, including
> her new one, Nigella Kitchen, it’s a self-deprecating “know thyself”. In the
> kitchen, that means best results from least effort and, crucially, with
> minimum guilt. And it’s for that acceptance of fallibility that the
> 50-year-old Nigella has risen to the plane of one-named deity.
>
> Her new series is, she says, about “how we all cook… in reality”. That sets it
> against some of the more recent fads in food. It is a decade since Nigella
> Bites, her first programme, was broadcast, and in that time sustainable,
> organic and locally sourced produce have all come into vogue. Supermarkets are
> the enemy, farmers’ market the cure-all. Typically, Lawson’s take is that this
> is all well and good – if you have the time.
>
> “To get local, to get organic and to get in season is obviously good in and of
> itself. However, there’s a snobbery about it. In the old days rich men built
> glasshouses so they could have pineapples: it was all about getting things out
> of season. Only the peasants would have root vegetables and things that were
> local and seasonal. It’s interesting that now what was rare is easily
> attainable, suddenly there’s an elitism that’s created about food… Would I
> like to have my own vegetable plot and all that? Yes I really, really would
> but I wouldn’t get any work done. This ideal way of shopping is great but I
> don’t know how you do it.”
>
> This leaves us in the rather bizarre situation where it is Nigella Lawson,
> multi-millionaire wife of multi-multi-millionaire art dealer Charles Saatchi,
> heiress, daughter of a Life Peer, someone to whom having it all on a plate
> could not be a more apt metaphor, who finds herself the champion of ordinary
> folk.
>
> If that seems ironic, Lawson’s approach resonates because she encourages
> people not to feel bad about themselves: she doesn’t.
>
> “I think that it’s misinterpreted always to mean that I believe in absolute
> untrammelled gluttony. I don’t. No one feels good if they overeat non-stop but
> I do think that you shouldn’t be frightened of food – as if it’s always
> something that’s got to be feared, not enjoyed.”
>
> It is a credo drawn from her relationship with her late mother, the heiress
> and socialite Vanessa Salmon, who died in 1985 when Lawson was 25. In a recent
> article, she said that the memory of “my perpetually dieting, self-denying
> mother saying – once she knew she had only a few weeks to live – that this was
> the first time she had eaten what she wanted and could enjoy it, is still
> shocking to me.”
>
> Lawson is candid about her mother, whose “Praised Chicken” recipe has featured
> in both her book and series.
>
> “She had a variety of eating disorders. I kind of knew that she was anorexic
> but I didn’t really twig that she was bulimic until after she died. I think I
> really felt, ‘I do not want to be like that.’ As a consequence, my act of teen
> rebellion was not being skinny. It doesn’t mean to say I want to get as fat as
> I can: like any woman, you have a comfortable area and you don’t want to
> extend beyond that. But in my experience enjoying food is probably a good way
> of not getting into that binge mentality.”
>
> Her mother, her sister and her first husband, the journalist John Diamond, all
> died of cancer, and this also informs her outlook. “People think thin is
> healthy and fat isn’t. I’ve seen a lot of people die from cancer. Believe me,
> for me, thinness is not equated to health.
>
> So I think there’s something in me that feels life has to be seized and food
> is part of that. I feel that appetites are transferable – an appetite for life
> has to translate into an appetite for food as well. If you restrain your
> hunger for food I think it slightly detaches you from life.”

Now that you've got all that off your chest...what's next?

"Ubiquitous" > wrote in message
...
> By Benji Wilson
>
> For someone whose gorgeous, pouting face once graced a book called How
> to Be a
> Domestic Goddess, Nigella Lawson has a lot of very mortal hang-ups.
> She is
> clumsy and she can be bad-tempered, she says. She doesn't like her bum
> ("I
> tell my cameraman Neville that he's not allowed to film my bottom") or
> her
> hair ("In real life I don't even have a hairdryer. as you can see").


It must be difficult for a cook to keep slim. There's quite a bit more
of the Barefoot Contessa than there used to be ( to be ungentlemanly.)
--
Jim Silverton
Potomac, Maryland

By Benji Wilson

For someone whose gorgeous, pouting face once graced a book called How to Be a
Domestic Goddess, Nigella Lawson has a lot of very mortal hang-ups. She is
clumsy and she can be bad-tempered, she says. She doesn’t like her bum (“I
tell my cameraman Neville that he’s not allowed to film my bottom”) or her
hair (“In real life I don’t even have a hairdryer… as you can see”).

TV conceals all of these things and she even feels bad about that. “When you
do TV you’ve got a hair and make-up artist and nothing’s out of place. So I do
slightly worry that I disappoint in real life.”

The point about the whole “Domestic Goddess” thing, of course, is that it was
tongue-in-cheek. No one is a domestic goddess, not Nigella, not any of us, and
if there is a line that runs through both her books and TV series, including
her new one, Nigella Kitchen, it’s a self-deprecating “know thyself”. In the
kitchen, that means best results from least effort and, crucially, with
minimum guilt. And it’s for that acceptance of fallibility that the
50-year-old Nigella has risen to the plane of one-named deity.

Her new series is, she says, about “how we all cook… in reality”. That sets it
against some of the more recent fads in food. It is a decade since Nigella
Bites, her first programme, was broadcast, and in that time sustainable,
organic and locally sourced produce have all come into vogue. Supermarkets are
the enemy, farmers’ market the cure-all. Typically, Lawson’s take is that this
is all well and good – if you have the time.

“To get local, to get organic and to get in season is obviously good in and of
itself. However, there’s a snobbery about it. In the old days rich men built
glasshouses so they could have pineapples: it was all about getting things out
of season. Only the peasants would have root vegetables and things that were
local and seasonal. It’s interesting that now what was rare is easily
attainable, suddenly there’s an elitism that’s created about food… Would I
like to have my own vegetable plot and all that? Yes I really, really would
but I wouldn’t get any work done. This ideal way of shopping is great but I
don’t know how you do it.”

This leaves us in the rather bizarre situation where it is Nigella Lawson,
multi-millionaire wife of multi-multi-millionaire art dealer Charles Saatchi,
heiress, daughter of a Life Peer, someone to whom having it all on a plate
could not be a more apt metaphor, who finds herself the champion of ordinary
folk.

If that seems ironic, Lawson’s approach resonates because she encourages
people not to feel bad about themselves: she doesn’t.

“I think that it’s misinterpreted always to mean that I believe in absolute
untrammelled gluttony. I don’t. No one feels good if they overeat non-stop but
I do think that you shouldn’t be frightened of food – as if it’s always
something that’s got to be feared, not enjoyed.”

It is a credo drawn from her relationship with her late mother, the heiress
and socialite Vanessa Salmon, who died in 1985 when Lawson was 25. In a recent
article, she said that the memory of “my perpetually dieting, self-denying
mother saying – once she knew she had only a few weeks to live – that this was
the first time she had eaten what she wanted and could enjoy it, is still
shocking to me.”

Lawson is candid about her mother, whose “Praised Chicken” recipe has featured
in both her book and series.

“She had a variety of eating disorders. I kind of knew that she was anorexic
but I didn’t really twig that she was bulimic until after she died. I think I
really felt, ‘I do not want to be like that.’ As a consequence, my act of teen
rebellion was not being skinny. It doesn’t mean to say I want to get as fat as
I can: like any woman, you have a comfortable area and you don’t want to
extend beyond that. But in my experience enjoying food is probably a good way
of not getting into that binge mentality.”

Her mother, her sister and her first husband, the journalist John Diamond, all
died of cancer, and this also informs her outlook. “People think thin is
healthy and fat isn’t. I’ve seen a lot of people die from cancer. Believe me,
for me, thinness is not equated to health.

So I think there’s something in me that feels life has to be seized and food
is part of that. I feel that appetites are transferable – an appetite for life
has to translate into an appetite for food as well. If you restrain your
hunger for food I think it slightly detaches you from life.”

On 9/29/2010 3:54 PM, Ubiquitous wrote:
> So I think there’s something in me that feels life has to be seized and food
> is part of that. I feel that appetites are transferable – an appetite for life
> has to translate into an appetite for food as well. If you restrain your
> hunger for food I think it slightly detaches you from life.”

That was interesting, thanks for posting it.

Becca